AMY SNAPS AWAKE. SHE’S in the car, parked across the street from the storage complex. She wipes crust from her eyes and curses. There’s a car parked in front of Jamie Leaver’s unit, a black BMW. Can’t have been there long. Amy remembers the start of dawn and it’s only eight thirty now. She takes down the plate numbers and walks them up the street to a busted phone booth where she calls Dirty Doug.
It seems like it might be a bit early for Dirty Doug and his nefarious dealings, but the man picks up.
‘It’s Amy Owens. Can you run me a quick plate check?’
‘How quick?’
‘Can you do it now?’
‘For a fee.’
She reads off the digits and says, ‘I’ll be waiting.’
‘Hang on. I have the other thing for you.’
‘What other thing?’
‘From the other night here. That house out back of Gaven belongs to Walter Pronzini.’
It’s the house she followed Bill Webber to two nights back. His quick visit.
‘Okay. Thanks, Doug. Call me back.’
Amy racks the phone and pain surges in her bad hand. She’s slept on it.
A wave of nausea blooms.
Old history.
Standing in some street across from a shed full of guns.
Trading one headache for another.
In Amy’s estimation, it was about five years ago that the wheels came off.
The dark old days.
After her brother died, and after her academic career collapsed, there was a long stretch of slower, less spectacular decline. Amy took her family-money and moved out. She lived on the Strip and partied every night. She didn’t even pretend to work or to have a job. There were no board seats or community service for her. No galas or fundraisers. No husband or family, either. Just an endless state of distraction. The Gold Coast in the seventies.
Mid ’75, she cocked up one of her father’s business soirees. Knocked over the champagne fountain at the launch of some shopping centre. That was enough for Victor.
He cut her off.
It didn’t stop her.
She still had the rep. A party girl, she knew how to bring people to a place and keep them there. A hundred wannabe socialites, a thousand lonely strangers. She slipped into club promotion like a hand into a silk glove. All the clubs she worked for were owned by Colleen.
At first, the grifts were small-time.
Free drinks went top shelf. Pinching play money from the till. She passed around a bit of blow. Acid if you wanted it. Pills on the down low.
She connected people.
Then Harry Harvey entered the picture. Harry was a scumbag Colleen had running the clubs. He mentioned to Amy that he had his own line on powders. It was double your money for the same risk. Amy figured she was already doing the bit, so why not. Maths was never her strong suit. It didn’t take Colleen long to work out why sales were dropping off.
One August night, Amy is asleep in her bed, having just got in.
The front door flies in.
Footfall in the hall.
Three men and no words.
They drag her out of the apartment screaming, and absolutely no one in the building says a word. They ram her in the back of a car alongside Harry.
The drive takes forever, but it’s no more than thirty minutes, out of the coast and into the hinterland, off the bitumen into the gravel.
It’s pitch-black.
Amy’s adrenaline is pumping.
She’s going to die.
They turn off into some no-name part of the bush.
Headlights wash over a figure in the trees.
Oh fuck.
It’s Tommy Lomax.
Everyone knows Tommy. He’s the last person anyone on the coast wants to see, because he’s the last person a lot of people see. Everyone in the trade is completely terrified of him.
The rest of what happens is a lurid, blurry nightmare.
They both cop a beating.
Tommy uses a leather belt.
He spits on them, presses his dirty fingers into their wounds. He’s relentless. Demon eyes blazing in the headlights. He has a roll of electrical tape and he wraps Harry’s dying head in it, then tapes Amy’s hand to Harry’s face, her palm covering his eyes, because I don’t want that dog looking at me, and then Tommy takes a handgun and presses it into Amy’s hand and pulls the trigger, killing Harry and exploding Amy’s whole life up to that point, spraying her face in pink mist.
A sound comes out of Amy like she’s never heard before. She tries to escape, to pull away, but she’s still taped to Harry’s wet, heavy skull. She’s caught like a wild animal.
Tommy grabs her by the hair. ‘Colleen wants you in her office on Monday.’
And then they’re gone.
Men disappearing into cars.
Cars backing out.
Cars driving away.
Amy sitting there in the absolute darkness of the scrub, still attached to the dead body of her former boss. Dazed and in shock, it feels like she’s falling, like Harry’s body is dragging her down like an anchor.
She starts to sink.
And it never stops.
The phone in the booth rings, bringing Amy out of the haze.
‘Doug?’
‘The car is registered to Marion O’Grady. Fifteen Pohlman Drive, Southport.’
She hangs up.
Goddamn.
That’s the fucking house again, the one she photographed for Colleen a week ago.
She calls Colleen and lays it out.
Colleen barely listens.
She isn’t putting together the pieces.
Bill Webber drove past that house the other night as well. Now the O’Gradys’ car is here, one degree of separation from a dead Jamie Leaver down in Coolangatta.
‘Mike’s in the lock-up,’ Colleen says. ‘I just got word from a guy in the station house. They brought him in last night.’
‘How did they get to him?’
‘I don’t know, Amy. How did they find him?’ screams Colleen. ‘You have to fucking fix this. Call in everyone. Everything. Just … whatever it takes. Fuck. I was so close. Goddamn it. And you, you had one fucking job. I better not … you better not be involved.’
‘He was safe and sound when I left.’
‘I hope that’s true, for your sake. In the meantime, you fucking fix this. Fix it.’
The phone goes dead.
Amy stands in the booth. She thinks and thinks.
No answer arrives.
Amy sits in a patch of dry grass by the phone box. She puts her head between her knees and tries to breathe. What she wants, above all else, is a drink. But that’s the problem. The start and the middle and the end of every problem.
The sun illuminates everything around her.
Sweat running from her pits.
She can’t move.
Fix it.